Produced by Juliet Sutherland and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
"'_Take away your flowers, my dear._'"]
THE NABOB
BY
ALPHONSE DAUDET
TRANSLATED BY
GEORGE BURNHAM IVES
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
BOSTONLITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY1902
_Copyright, 1898_,By Little, Brown, and Company.
_All rights reserved._
University Press:John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE TO FRENCH EDITION
We have been informed that at the time of the publication of _TheNabob_ in serial form, the government of Tunis was offended at theintroduction therein of individuals whom the author dressed in namesand costumes peculiar to that country. We are authorized by M. AlphonseDaudet to declare that those scenes in the book which relate to Tunisare entirely imaginary, and that he never intended to introduce any ofthe functionaries of that state.
ALPHONSE DAUDET.
Alphonse Daudet is one of the most richly gifted of modern Frenchnovelists and one of the most artistic; he is perhaps the mostdelightful; and he is certainly the most fortunate. In his own countryearlier than any of his contemporaries he saw his stories attain to thevery wide circulation that brings both celebrity and wealth. Beyond theborders of his own language he swiftly won a popularity both with thebroad public and with the professed critics of literature, second onlyto that of Victor Hugo and still surpassing that of Balzac, who is onlyof late beginning to receive from us the attention he has so longdeserved.
Daudet has had the rare luck of pleasing partisans of almost everyschool; the realists have joyed in his work and so have the romanticists;his writings have found favor in the eyes of the frank impressionistsand also at the hands of the severer custodians of academic standards.Mr. Henry James has declared that Daudet is "at the head of hisprofession" and has called him "an admirable genius." Mr. Robert LouisStevenson thought Daudet "incomparably" the best of the present Frenchnovelists and asserted that "Kings in Exile" comes "very near to beinga masterpiece." M. Jules Lemaitre tells us that Daudet "trails allhearts after him,--because he has charm, as indefinable in a work ofart as in a woman's face." M. Ferdinand Brunetiere, who has scantrelish for latter-day methods in literature, admits ungrudgingly that"there are certain corners of the great city and certain aspects ofParisian manners, there are some physiognomies that perhaps no one hasbeen able to render so well as Daudet, with that infinitely subtle andpatient art which succeeds in giving even to inanimate things theappearance of life."
I.
The documents are abundant for an analysis of Daudet such asSainte-Beuve would have undertaken with avidity; they are more abundantindeed than for any other contemporary French man of letters even inthese days of unhesitating self-revelation; and they are also of anabsolutely impregnable authenticity. M. Ernest Daudet has written awhole volume to tell us all about his brother's boyhood and youth andearly manhood and first steps in literature. M. Leon Daudet has writtenanother solid tome to tell us all about his father's literaryprinciples and family life and later years and death. Daudet himselfput forth a pair of pleasant books of personal gossip about himself,narrating his relations with his fellow authors and recording thecircumstances under which he came to compose each of his earlierstories. Montaigne--whose "Essays" was Daudet's bedside book and whomay be accepted not unfairly as an authority upon egotism--assures usthat "there is no description so difficult, nor doubtless of so greatutility, as that of one's self." And Daudet's own interest in himselfis not unlike Montaigne's,--it is open, innocent and illuminating.
Cuvier may have been able to reconstruct an extinct monster from theinspection of a single bone; but it is a harder task to revive thefigure of a man, even by the aid of these family testimonies, thisself-analysis, the diligence of countless interviewers of allnationalities, and indiscretion of a friend like Edmond de Goncourt(who seems to have acted on the theory that it is the whole duty of manto take notes of the talk of his fellows for prompt publication). Yetwe have ample material to enable us to trace Daudet's heredity, and toestimate the influence of his environment in the days of his youth, andto allow for the effect which certain of his own physical peculiaritiesmust have had upon his exercise of his art. His near-sightedness, forexample,--would not Sainte-Beuve have seized upon this as significant?Would he not have seen in this a possible source of Daudet's mastery ofdescription? And the spasms of pain borne bravely and uncomplainingly,the long agony of his later years, what mark has this left on his work,how far is it responsible for a modification of his attitude,--for thechange from the careless gaiety of "Tartarin of Tarascon" to the sombresatire of "Port-Tarascon"? What caused the joyous story-teller of the"Letters from my Mill" to develop into the bitter iconoclast of the"Immortal."
These questions are insistent; and yet, after all, what matters theanswer to any of them? The fact remains that Daudet had his share ofthat incommunicable quality which we are agreed to call genius. Thisonce admitted, we may do our best to weigh it and to resolve it intoits elements, it is at bottom the vital spark that resists allexamination, however scientific we may seek to be. We can test for thisand for that, but in the final analysis genius is inexplicable. It iswhat it is, because it is. It might have been different, no doubt, butit is not. It is its own excuse for being; and, for all that we can sayto the contrary, it is its own cause, sufficient unto itself. Even ifwe had Sainte-Beuve's scalpel, we could not surprise the secret.
Yet an inquiry into the successive stages of Daudet's career, aconsideration of his ancestry, of his parentage, of his birth, of thecircumstances of his boyhood, of his youthful adventures,--these thingsare interesting in themselves and they are not without instruction.They reveal to us the reasons for the transformation that goes so farto explain Daudet's peculiar position,--the transformation of a youngProvencal poet into a brilliant Parisian veritist. Daudet was aProvencal who became a Parisian,--and in this translation we may findthe key to his character as a writer of fiction.
He was from Provence as Maupassant was from Normandy; and Daudet hadthe Southern expansiveness and abundance, just as Maupassant had theNorthern reserve and caution. If an author is ever to bring forth fruitafter his kind he must have roots in the soil of his nativity. Daudetwas no orchid, beautiful and scentless; his writings have always thefull flavor of the southern soil. He was able to set Tartarin before usso sympathetically and to make Numa Roumestan so convincing because herecognized in himself the possibility of a like exuberance. He couldnever take the rigorously impassive attitude which Flaubert taughtMaupassant to assume. Daudet not only feels for his characters, but heis quite willing that we should be aware of his compassion.
He is not only incapable of the girding enmity which Taine detected anddetested in Thackeray's treatment of Becky Sharp, but he is also devoidof the callous detachment with which Flaubert dissected Emma Bovaryunder the microscope. Daudet is never flagrantly hostile toward one ofhis creatures; and, however contemptible or despicable the charactershe has called into being, he is scrupulously fair to them. Sidonie andFelicia Ruys severally throw themselves away, but Daudet is neverintolerant. He is inexorable, but he is not insulting. I cannot butthink that it is Provence whence Daudet derived the precious birthrightof sympathy, and that it is Provence again which bestowed on him therarer gift of sentiment. It is by his possession of sympathy and ofsentiment that he has escaped the aridity which suffocates us in theworks of so many other Parisian novelists. The South endowed him withwarmth and heartiness and vivacity; and what he learnt from Paris wasthe power of self-restraint and the dut
y of finish.
He was born in Provence and he died in Paris; he began as a poet and heended as a veritist; and in each case there was logical evolution andnot contradiction. The Parisian did not cease to be a Provencal; andthe novelist was a lyrist still. Poet though he was, he had an intenseliking for the actual, the visible, the tangible. He so hungered aftertruth that he was ready sometimes to stay his stomach with facts in itsstead,--mere fact being but the outward husk, whereas truth is the richkernel concealed within. His son tells us that Daudet might have takenas a motto the title of Goethe's autobiography, "Dichtung undWahrheit,"--Poetry and Truth. And this it is that has set Daudet apartand that has caused his vogue with readers of all sorts andconditions,--this unique combination of imagination and verity. "Hisoriginality," M. Jules Lemaitre has acutely remarked, "is closely tounite observation and fantasy, to extract from the truth all that itcontains of the improbable and the surprising, to satisfy at the sametime the readers of M. Cherbuliez and the readers of M. Zola, to writenovels which are at the same time realistic and romantic, and whichseem romantic only because they are very sincerely and very profoundlyrealistic."
II.
Alphonse Daudet was born in 1840, and it was at Nimes that he firstbegan to observe mankind; and he has described his birthplace and hisboyhood in "Little What's-his-name," a novel even richer inautobiographical revelation than is "David Copperfield." His father wasa manufacturer whose business was not prosperous and who was forced atlast to remove with the whole family to Lyons in the vain hope of doingbetter in the larger town. After reading the account of this parent'speculiarities in M. Ernest Daudet's book, we are not surprised that theaffairs of the family did not improve, but went from bad to worse.Alphonse Daudet suffered bitterly in these years of desperate struggle,but he gained an understanding of the conditions of mercantile life, tobe serviceable later in the composition of "Fromont and Risler."
When he was sixteen he secured a place as _pion_ in a boarding schoolin the Cevennes,--_pion_ is a poor devil of a youth hired to keep watchon the boys. How painful this position was to the young poet can beread indirectly in "Little What's-his-name," but more explicitly in thehistory of that story, printed now in "Thirty Years of Paris." Fromthis remote prison he was rescued by his elder brother, Ernest, who wastrying to make his way in Paris and who sent for Alphonse as soon as hehad been engaged to help an old gentleman in writing his memoirs. Theyounger brother has described his arrival in Paris, and his firstdress-coat and his earliest literary acquaintances. Ernest's salary wasseventy-five francs a month, and on this the two brothers managed tolive; no doubt fifteen dollars went further in Paris in 1857 than theywill in 1899.
In those days of privation and ambition Daudet's longing was to makehimself famous as a poet; and when at last, not yet twenty years old,he began his career as a man of letters it was by the publication of avolume of verse, just as his fellow-novelists, M. Paul Bourget andSignor Gabriele d'Annunzio have severally done. Immature as juvenilelyrics are likely to be, these early rhymes of Daudet's have a flavorof their own, a faintly recognizable note of individuality. He is morenaturally a poet than most modern literators who possess theaccomplishment of verse as part of their equipment for the literarylife, but who lack a spontaneous impulse toward rhythm. It may even besuggested that his little poems are less artificial than most Frenchverse; they are the result of a less obvious effort. He lisped innumbers; and with him it was rather prose that had to be consciouslyacquired. His lyric note, although not keen and not deep, is heardagain and again in his novels, and it sustains some of the mostgraceful and tender of his short stories,--"The Death of the Dauphin,"for instance, and the "Sous-prefet in the Fields."
Daudet extended poetry to include playmaking; and alone or with afriend he attempted more than one little piece in rhyme--tiny plays ofa type familiar enough at the Odeon. He has told us how the news of theproduction of one of these poetic dramas came to him afar in Algierswhither he had been sent because of a weakness of the lungs,threatening to become worse in the gray Parisian winter. Other plays ofhis, some of them far more important than this early effort, wereproduced in the next few years. The most ambitious of these was the"Woman of Arles," which he had elaborated from a touching short storyand for which Bizet composed incidental music as beautiful and asoverwhelming as that prepared by Mendelssohn for the "Midsummer Night'sDream."
No one of Daudet's dramatic attempts was really successful; not the"Woman of Arles," which is less moving in the theatre than in itsbriefer narrative form, not even the latest of them all, the freshestand the most vigorous, the "Struggle for Life," with its sinisterfigure of Paul Astier taken over from the "Immortal." Apparently, withall his desire to write for the stage, Daudet must have beeninadequately endowed with the dramaturgic faculty, that special gift ofplaymaking which many a poet lacks and many a novelist, but which thehumblest playwright must needs have and which all the great dramatistshave possessed abundantly in addition to their poetic power.
Perhaps it was the unfavorable reception of his successive dramas whichis responsible for the chief of Daudet's lapses from the kindlinesswith which he treats the characters that people his stories. He seemsto have kept hot a grudge against the theatre: and he relieves hisfeelings by taking it out of the stage-folk he introduces into hisnovels. To actors and actresses he is intolerant and harsh. What isfactitious and self-overvaluing in the Provencal type, he understoodand he found it easy to pardon; but what was factitious andself-overvaluing in the player type, he would not understand and herefused to pardon. And here he shows in strong contrast with asuccessful dramatist, M. Ludovic Halevy, whose knowledge of thehistrionic temperament is at least as wide as Daudet's and whose humoris as keen, but whose judgment is softened by the grateful memory ofmany victories won by the united effort of the author and the actor.
Through his brother's influence, Alphonse Daudet was appointed by theDuke de Morny to a semi-sinecure; and he has recorded how he told hisbenefactor before accepting the place that he was a Legitimist and howthe Duke smilingly retorted that the Empress was also. Although it wasas a poet that Daudet made his bow in the world of letters, his firstappearance as a dramatist was not long delayed thereafter; and he sooncame forward also as a journalist,--or rather as a contributor to thepapers. While many of the articles he prepared for the daily and weeklypress were of ephemeral interest only, as the necessity of journalismdemands, to be forgotten forty-eight hours after they were printed, nota few of them were sketches having more than a temporary value.Parisian newspapers are more hospitable to literature than are thenewspapers of New York or of London; and a goodly proportion of theyoung Southerner's journalistic writing proved worthy of preservation.
It has been preserved for us in three volumes of short stories andsketches, of fantasies and impressions. Not all the contents of the"Letters from my Mill," of the "Monday Tales" and of "Artists' Wives,"as we have these collections now, were written in these early years ofDaudet's Parisian career, but many of them saw the light before 1870,and what has been added since conforms in method to the work of his'prentice days. No doubt the war with Prussia enlarged his outlook onlife; and there is more depth in the satires this conflict suggestedand more pathos in the pictures it evoked. The "Last Lesson," forexample, that simple vision of the old French schoolmaster taking leaveof his Alsatian pupils, has a symbolic breath not easy to match in thelivelier tales written before the surrender at Sedan; and in the "Siegeof Berlin" there is a vibrant patriotism far more poignant than we candiscover in any of the playful apologues published before the war. Hehad had an inside view of the Second Empire, he could not help seeingits hollowness, and he revolted against the selfishness of itsservants; no single chapter of M. Zola's splendid and terrible"Downfall" contains a more damning indictment of the leaders of theimperial army than is to be read in Daudet's "Game of Billiards."
The short story, whether in prose or in verse, is a literary form inwhich the French have ever displayed an easy mastery; and from Daudet's
three volumes it would not be difficult to select half-a-dozen littlemasterpieces. The Provencal tales lack only rhymes to stand confessedas poesy; and many a reader may prefer these first flights beforeDaudet set his Pegasus to toil in the mill of realism. The "Pope'sMule," for instance, is not this a marvel of blended humor and fantasy?And the "Elixir of Father Gaucher," what could be more naively ironic?Like a true Southerner, Daudet delights in girding at the Church; andthese tales bristle with jibes at ecclesiastical dignitaries; but hisstroke is never malignant and there is no barb to his shaft nor poisonon the tip.
Scarcely inferior to the war-stories or to the Provencal sketches arecertain vignettes of the capital, swift silhouettes of Paris, glimpsedby an unforgetting eye, the "Last Book," for one, in which an unlovelycharacter is treated with kindly contempt; and for another, the"Book-keeper," the most Dickens-like of Daudet's shorter pieces, yethaving a literary modesty Dickens never attained. The alleged imitationof the British novelist by the French may be left for laterconsideration; but it is possible now to note that in the earlierdescriptive chapters of the "Letters from my Mill" one may detect acertain similarity of treatment and attitude, not to Dickens but to twoof the masters on whom Dickens modelled himself, Goldsmith and Irving.The scene in the diligence, when the baker gently pokes fun at the poorfellow whose wife is intermittent in her fidelity, is quite in themanner of the "Sketch Book."
There is the same freshness and fertility in the collection called"Artists' Wives" as in the "Letters from my Mill," and the "MondayTales," but not the same playfulness and fun. They are severe studies,all of them; and they all illustrate the truth of Bagehot's saying thata man's mother might be his misfortune, but his wife was his fault. Itis a rosary of marital infelicities that Daudet has strung for us inthis volume, and in every one of them the husband is expiating hisblunder. With ingenious variety the author rings the changes on onetheme, on the sufferings of the ill-mated poet or painter or sculptor,despoiled of the sympathy he craves, and shackled even in the exerciseof his art. And the picture is not out of drawing, for Daudet can seethe wife's side of the case also; he can appreciate her bewilderment atthe ugly duckling whom it is so difficult for her to keep in the nest.The women have made shipwreck of their lives too, and they arecompanions in misery, if not helpmeets in understanding. This isperhaps the saddest of all Daudet's books, the least relieved by humor,the most devoid of the gaiety which illumines the "Letters from myMill" and the first and second "Tartarin" volumes. But it is also oneof the most veracious; it is life itself firmly grasped and honestlypresented.
It is not matrimonial incongruity at large in all its shifting aspectsthat Daudet here considers; it is only the married unhappiness of theartist, whatever his mode of expression, and whichever of the muses hehas chosen to serve; it is only the wedded life of the man incessantlyin search of the ideal, and never relaxing in the strain of hisstruggle with the inflexible material from which he must shape hisvision of existence. Not only in this book, but in many another hasDaudet shown that he perceives the needs of the artistic temperament,its demands, its limitations and its characteristics. There is aplaywright in "Rose and Ninette;" there is a painter in the "Immortal;"there is an actor in "Fromont and Risler;" there are a sculptor, apoet, and a novelist on the roll of the heroine's lovers in "Sapho."Daudet handles them gently always, unless they happen to belong to thetheatre. Toward the stage-folk he is pitiless; for all other artists hehas abundant appreciation; he is not blind to their little weaknesses,but these he can forgive even though he refuses to forget; he is athome with them. He is never patronizing, as Thackeray is, who alsoknows them and loves them. Thackeray's attitude is that of a gentlemanborn to good society, but glad to visit Bohemia, because he can speakthe language; Daudet's is that of a man of letters who thinks that hisfellow-artists are really the best society.
III.
Not with pictures of artists at home did Daudet conquer his commandingposition in literature, not with short stories, not with plays, notwith verses. These had served to make him known to the inner circle oflovers of literature who are quick to appreciate whatever is at oncenew and true; but they did not help him to break through the crust andto reach the hearts of the broad body of readers who care little forthe delicacies of the season, but must ever be fed on strong meat. Whenthe latest of the three volumes of short stories was published, andwhen the "Woman of Arles" was produced, the transformation wascomplete: the poet had developed into a veritist, without ceasing to bea poet, and the Provencal had become a Parisian. His wander-years wereat an end, and he had made a happy marriage. Lucky in the riskyadventure of matrimony, as in so many others, he chanced upon a womanwho was congenial, intelligent and devoted, and who became almost acollaborator in all his subsequent works.
His art was ready for a larger effort; it was ripe for a richerfruitage. Already had he made more than one attempt at a long story,but this was before his powers had matured, and before he had come to afull knowledge of himself. "Little What's-his-name," as he himself hasconfessed, lacks perspective; it was composed too soon after thepersonal experiences out of which it was made,--before Time had put thescenes in proper proportion and before his hand was firm in its stroke."Robert Helmont" is the journal of an observer who happens also to be apoet and a patriot; but it has scarcely substance enough to warrantcalling it a story. Much of the material used in the making of thesebooks was very good indeed; but the handling was a little uncertain,and the result is not quite satisfactory, charming as both of them are,with the seductive grace which is Daudet's birthright and histrademark. In his brief tales he had shown that he had thestory-telling faculty, the ability to project character, the gift ofarousing interest; but it remained for him to prove that he possessedalso the main strength requisite to carry him through the long labor ofa full-grown novel. It is not by gentle stories like "Robert Helmont"and "Little What's-his-name" that a novelist is promoted to the frontrank; and after he had written these two books he remained where he wasbefore, in the position of a promising young author.
The promise was fulfilled by the publication of "Fromont andRisler,"--not the best of his novels, but the earliest in which hisfull force was displayed. Daudet has told us how this was plannedoriginally as a play, how the failure of the "Woman of Arles" led himto relinquish the dramatic form, and how the supposed necessities ofthe stage warped the logical structure of the story, turning upon theintrigues of the young wife the interest which should have beenconcentrated upon the partnership, the business rivalry, the mercantileintegrity, whence the novel derived its novelty. The falsifying habitof thrusting marital infidelity into the foreground of fiction when thetheme itself seems almost to exclude any dwelling on amorousmisadventure, Daudet yielded to only this once; and this is one reasonwhy a truer view of Parisian life can be found in his pages than inthose of any of his competitors, and why his works are far lessmonotonous than theirs.
He is not squeamish, as every reader of "Sapho" can bear witness; buthe does not wantonly choose a vulgar adultery as the staple of hisstories. French fiction, ever since the tale of "Tristan and Yseult"was first told, has tended to be a poem of love triumphant over everyobstacle, even over honor; and Daudet is a Frenchman with French ideasabout woman and love and marriage; he is not without his share ofGallic salt; but he is too keen an observer not to see that there areother things in life than illicit wooings,--business, for example, andpolitics, and religion,--important factors all of them in ourcomplicated modern existence. At the root of him Daudet had a steadfastdesire to see life as a whole and to tell the truth about itunhesitatingly; and this is a characteristic he shares only with thegreat masters of fiction,--essentially veracious, every one of them.
Probably Dickens, frequently as he wrenched the facts of life intoconformity with his rather primitive artistic code, believed that healso was telling the truth. It is in Daudet's paper explaining how hecame to write "Fromont and Risler" that he discusses the accusationthat he was an imitator of Dickens,--an accusation which seems
absurdenough now that the careers of both writers are closed, and that we cancompare their complete works. Daudet records that the charge wasbrought against him very early, long before he had read Dickens, and heexplains that any likeness that may exist is due not to copying but tokinship of spirit. "I have deep in my heart," he says, "the same loveDickens has for the maimed and the poor, for the children brought up inall the deprivation of great cities." This pity for the disinherited,for those that have had no chance in life, is not the only similaritybetween the British novelist and the French; there is also the peculiarcombination of sentiment and humor. Daudet is not so bold as Dickens,not so robust, not so over-mastering; but he is far more discreet, fartruer to nature, far finer in his art; he does not let his humor carryhim into caricature, nor his sentiment slop over into sentimentality.
Even the minor French novelists strive for beauty of form, and wouldbe ashamed of the fortuitous scaffolding that satisfies the Britishstory-tellers. A eulogist of Dickens, Mr. George Gissing, has recentlyremarked acutely that "Daudet has a great advantage in his mastery ofconstruction. Where, as in 'Fromont and Risler,' he constructs toowell, that is to say, on the stage model, we see what a gain it wasto him to have before his eyes the Paris stage of the Second Empire,instead of that of London in the earlier Victorian time." Where Dickensemulated the farces and the melodramas of forgotten Britishplaywrights, Daudet was influenced rather by the virile dramas of Dumas_fils_ and Augier. But in "Fromont and Risler," not only is the plot atrifle stagy, but the heroine herself seems almost a refugee of thefootlights; exquisitely presented as Sidonie is, she fails quite tocaptivate or convince, perhaps because her sisters have been seen sooften before in this play and in that. And now and again even in hislater novels we discover that Daudet has needlessly achieved the adroitarrangement of events so useful in the theatre and not requisite in thelibrary. In "The Nabob," for example, it is the "long arm ofcoincidence" that brings Paul de Gery to the inn on the Riviera, and tothe very next room therein at the exact moment when Jenkins catches upwith the fleeing Felicia.
Yet these lapses into the arbitrary are infrequent after all; and as"Fromont and Risler" was followed first by one and then by anothernovel, the evil influence of theatrical conventionalism disappears.Daudet occasionally permits himself an underplot; but he acts always onthe principle he once formulated to his son: "every book is anorganism; if it has not its organs in place, it dies, and its corpse isa scandal." Sometimes, as in "Fromont and Risler," he starts at themoment when the plot thickens, returning soon to make clear theantecedents of the characters first shown in action; and sometimes, asin "Sapho," he begins right at the beginning and goes straight throughto the end. But, whatever his method, there is never any doubt as tothe theme; and the essential unity is always apparent. This severity ofdesign in no way limits the variety of the successive acts of hisdrama.
While a novel of Balzac's is often no more than an analysis ofcharacter, and while a novel of Zola's is a massive epic of humanendeavor, a novel of Daudet's is a gallery of pictures, brushed in withthe sweep and certainty of a master-hand,--portraits, landscapes withfigures, marines, battlepieces pieces, bits of _genre_, views of Paris.And the views of Paris outnumber the others, and almost outvalue themalso. Mr. Henry James has noted that "The Nabob" is "full of episodeswhich are above all pages of execution, triumphs of translation. Theauthor has drawn up a list of the Parisian solemnities, and painted theportrait, or given a summary, of each of them. The opening day at theSalon, a funeral at Pere la Chaise, a debate in the Chamber ofDeputies, the _premiere_ of a new play at a favorite theatre, furnishhim with so many opportunities for his gymnastics of observation." And"The Nabob" is only a little more richly decorated than the "Immortal,"and "Numa Roumestan," and "Kings in Exile."
These pictures, these carefully wrought masterpieces of rendering arenot lugged in, each for its own sake; they are not outside of thenarrative; they are actually part of the substance of the story. Daudetexcels in describing, and every artist is prone to abound in the senseof his superiority. As the French saying puts it, a man has always thedefects of his qualities; yet Daudet rarely obtrudes his descriptions,and he generally uses them to explain character and to set off or bringout the moods of his personages. They are so swift that I am tempted tocall them flash-lights; but photographic is just what they are not, forthey are artistic in their vigorous suppression of the unessentials;they are never gray or cold or hard; they vibrate with color and tinglewith emotion.
And just as a painter keeps filling his sketch-books with graphic hintsfor elaboration later, so Daudet was indefatigable in note-taking. Heexplains his method in his paper of "Fromont and Risler;" how he hadfor a score of years made a practice of jotting down in littlenote-books not only his remarks and his thoughts, but also a rapidrecord of what he had heard with his ears ever on the alert, and whathe had seen with those tireless eyes of his. Yet he never let the dustof these note-books choke the life out of him. Every one of his novelswas founded on fact,--plot, incidents, characters and scenery.
He used his imagination to help him to see; he used it also to peerinto and behind the mere facts. All that he needed to invent was aconnecting link now and again; and it may as well be admitted at oncethat these mere inventions are sometimes the least satisfactory part ofhis stories. The two young men in "The Nabob," for instance, whom Mr.Henry James found it difficult to tell apart, the sculptor-painter inthe "Immortal," the occasional other characters which we discover to bemade up, lack the individuality and the vitality of figures taken fromreal life by a sympathetic effort of interpretative imagination.Delobelle, Gardinois, "all the personages of 'Fromont' have lived,"Daudet declares; and he adds a regret that in depicting old Gardinoishe gave pain to one he loved, but he "could not suppress this type ofegotist, aged and terrible."
Since the beginning of the art of story-telling, the narrators musthave gone to actuality to get suggestions for their character-drawing;and nothing is commoner than the accusation that this or that novelisthas stolen his characters ready-made,--filching them from nature'sshop-window, without so much as a by-your-leave. Daudet is bold incommitting these larcenies from life and frank in confessing them,--farfranker than Dickens, who tried to squirm out of the charge that he hadput Landor and Leigh Hunt unfairly into fiction. Perhaps Dickens wasbolder than Daudet, if it is true that he drew Micawber from his ownfather, and Mrs. Nickleby from his own mother. Daudet was taxed withingratitude that he had used as the model of Mora, the Duke de Morny,who had befriended him; and he defended himself by declaring that hethought the duke would find no fault with the way Mora had beenpresented. But a great artist has never copied his models slavishly; hehas utilized them in the effort to realize to his own satisfaction whathe has already imagined. Daudet maintained to his son that those whowere without imagination cannot even observe accurately. Inventionalone, mere invention, an inferior form of mental exercise, suffices toprovide a pretty fair romantic tale, remote from the facts of every-daylife, but only true imagination can sustain a realistic novel whereevery reader's experience qualifies him to check off the author'sprogress, step by step.
IV.
It would take too long--although the task would be amusing--to call theroll of Daudet's novels written after "Fromont and Risler" had revealedto him his own powers, and to discuss what fact of Parisian history hadbeen the starting point of each of them and what notabilities of Parishad sat for each of the chief characters. Mr. Henry James, forinstance, has seen it suggested that Felicia Ruys is intended as aportrait of Mme. Sarah-Bernhardt; M. Zola, on the other hand, deniesthat Felicia Ruys is Mme. Sarah-Bernhardt and hints that she is ratherMme. Judith Gautier. Daudet himself refers to the equally absurd reportthat Gambetta was the original of Numa Roumestan,--a report over whichthe alleged subject and the real author laughed together. Daudet's ownattitude toward his creations is a little ambiguous or at least alittle inconsistent; in one paper he asserts that every character ofhis has had a living original, and in another he adm
its that ElyseeMeraut, for example, is only in part a certain Therion.
The admission is more nearly exact than the assertion. Every novelistwhose work is to endure even for a generation must draw from life,sometimes generalizing broadly and sometimes keeping close to thesingle individual, but always free to modify the mere fact as he mayhave observed it to conform with the larger truth of the fable he shalldevise. Most story-tellers tend to generalize, and their fictions lackthe sharpness of outline we find in nature. Daudet prefers to retain asmuch of the actual individual as he dares without endangering the webof his composition; and often the transformation is very slight,--Mora,for instance, who is probably a close copy of Morny, but who stands onhis own feet in "The Nabob," and lives his own life as independently asthough he was a sheer imagination. More rarely the result is not sosatisfactory; J. Tom Levis, for example, for whose authenticity theauthor vouches, but who seems out of place in "Kings in Exile," like afantastic invention, such as Balzac sometimes permitted himself as arelief from his rigorous realism.
For incident as well as for character Daudet goes to real life. Theescape of Colette from under the eyes of her father-in-law,--thatactually happened; but none the less does it fit into "Kings in Exile."And Colette's cutting off her hair in grief at her husband'sdeath,--that actually happened also; but it belongs artistically in the"Immortal." On the other hand, the fact which served as the foundationof the "Immortal"--the taking in of a _savant_ by a lot of forgedmanuscripts--has been falsified by changing the _savant_ from amathematician (who might easily be deceived about a matter ofautographs) to a historian (whose duty it is to apply all known testsof genuineness to papers purporting to shed new light on the past).This borrowing from the newspaper has its evident advantages, but ithas its dangers also, even in the hands of a poet as adroit as Daudetand as imaginative. Perhaps the story of his which is most artistic inits telling, most shapely, most harmonious in its modulations of asingle theme to the inevitable end, developed without haste and withoutrest, is "Sapho;" and "Sapho" is the novel of Daudet's in which thereseems to be the least of this stencilling of actual fact, in which thegeneralization is the broadest, and in which the observation is leastrestricted to single individuals.
But in "Sapho" the theme itself is narrow, narrower than in "NumaRoumestan," and far narrower than in either "The Nabob" or "Kings inExile;" and this is why "Sapho," fine as it is, and subtle, is perhapsless satisfactory. No other French novelist of the final half of thenineteenth century, not Flaubert, not Goncourt, not M. Zola, notMaupassant, has four novels as solid as these, as varied in incident,as full of life, as rich in character, as true. They form thequadrilateral wherein Daudet's fame is secure.
"Sapho" is a daughter of the "Lady of the Camellias," and agrand-daughter of "Manon Lescaut,"--Frenchwomen, all of them, and of aclass French authors have greatly affected. But Daudet's book is not aspecimen of what Lowell called "that _corps-de-ballet_ literature inwhich the most animal of the passions is made more temptingly naked bya veil of French gauze." It is at bottom a moral book, much as "TomJones" is moral. Fielding's novel is English, robust, hearty, brutal ina way, and its morality is none too lofty. Daudet's is French, softer,more enervating, and with an almost complacent dwelling on the sins ofthe flesh. But neither Fielding nor Daudet is guilty of sentimentality,the one unforgivable crime in art. In his treatment of the relation ofthe sexes Daudet was above all things truthful; his veracity isinexorable. He shows how man is selfish in love and woman also, and howthe egotism of the one is not as the egotism of the other. He shows howFanny Legrand slangs her lover with the foul language of the gutterwhence she sprang, and how Jean when he strikes back, refrains fromfoul blows. He shows how Jean, weak of will as he was, gets rid of themillstone about his neck, only because of the weariness of the woman towhom he has bound himself. He shows us the various aspects of the lovewhich is not founded on esteem, the Hettema couple, De Potter and Rose,Dechelette and Alice Dore, all to set off the sorry idyl of Fanny andJean.
In "Numa Roumestan" there is a larger vision of life than in "Sapho,"even if there is no deeper insight. The construction is almost assevere; and the movement is unbroken from beginning to end, withoutexcursus or digression. The central figure is masterly,--the kindly andselfish Southerner, easy-going and soft-spoken, an orator who is soeloquent that he can even convince himself, a politician who thinksonly when he is talking, a husband who loves his wife as profoundly ashe can love anybody except himself, and who loves his wife more thanhis temporary mistress, even during the days of his dalliance. Numa isa native of the South of France, as was Daudet himself; and it is outof the fulness of knowledge that the author evolves the character,brushing in the portrait with bold strokes and unceasingly addingcaressing touches till the man actually lives and moves before oureyes. The veracity of the picture is destroyed by no finalinconsistency. What Numa is, Numa will be. Daudet never descends at theend of his novels like a god from the machine to change character inthe twinkling of an eye, and to convert bad men to good thoughts andgood deeds.
He can give us goodness when he chooses, a human goodness, notoffensively perfect, not preaching, not mawkish, but high-minded andengaging. There are two such types in "Kings in Exile," the Queen andElysee Meraut, essentially honest both of them, thinking little ofself, and sustained by lofty purpose. Naturalistic novelists generally(and M. Zola in particular), live in a black world peopled mainly byfools and knaves; from this blunder Daudet is saved by his Southerntemperament, by his lyric fervor, and, at bottom, by his wisdom. Heknows better; he knows that while a weak creature like Christian II. iscommon, a resolute soul like Frederique is not so very rare. He knowsthat the contrast and the clash of these characters is interestingmatter for the novelist. And no novelist has had a happier inspirationthan that which gave us "Kings in Exile," a splendid subject,splendidly handled, and lending itself perfectly to the display ofDaudet's best qualities, his poetry, his ability to seize the actual,and his power of dealing with material such as the elder Dumas wouldhave delighted in with a restraint and a logic the younger Dumas wouldhave admired. Plot and counter-plot, bravery, treachery, death,--theseare elements for a romanticist farrago; and in Daudet's hands they arewoven into a tapestry almost as stiff as life itself. The stuff isromantic enough, but the treatment is unhesitatingly realistic; and"Kings in Exile," better than any other novel of Daudet's, explains hisvogue with readers of the most divergent tastes.
In "The Nabob," the romantic element is slighter than in "Kings inExile;" the subject is not so striking; and the movement of the storyis less straightforward. But what a panorama of Paris it is that heunrolls before us in this story of a luckless adventurer in the city ofluxury then under the control of the imperial band of brigands! Nodoubt the Joyeuse family is an obtrusion and an artistic blemish, sincethey do not logically belong in the scheme of the story; and yet they(and their fellows in other books of Daudet's) testify to his effort toget the truth and the whole truth into his picture of Paris life. Moraand Felicia Ruys and Jenkins, these are the obverse of the medal,exposed in the shop-windows that every passer-by can see. The Joyeusegirls and their father are the reverse, to be viewed only by those whotake the trouble to look at the under side of things. They are samplesof the simple, gentle, honest folk, of whom there must be countlessthousands in France and even in its capital, but who fail to interestmost French novelists just because they are not eccentric or wicked orugly. Of a truth, Aline Joyeuse is as typically Parisian as FeliciaRuys herself; both are needed if the census is to be complete; and theomission of either is a source of error.
There is irony in Daudet's handling of these humbler figures, but it iscompassionate and almost affectionate. If he laughs at Father Joyeusethere is no harshness and no hostility in his mirth. For the Joyeusedaughters he has indulgence and pity; and his humor plays about themand leaves them scart-free. It never stings them or scorches or sears,as it does Astier-Rehu and Christian II. and the Prince of Axel, inspite of his desire to be fair toward all t
he creatures of his brain.
Irony is only one of the manifestations of Daudet's humor. Wit he hasalso, and satire. And he is doubly fortunate in that he has both humorand the sense-of-humor--the positive and the negative. It is thesense-of-humor, so called, that many humorists are without, adeprivation which allows them to take themselves so seriously that theybecome a laughing-stock for the world. It is the sense-of-humor thatmakes the master of comedy, that helps him to see things in dueproportion and perspective, that keeps him from exaggeration andemphasis, from sentimentality and melodrama and bathos. It is thesense-of-humor that prevents our making fools of ourselves; it is humoritself that softens our laughter at those who make themselvesridiculous. In his serious stories Daudet employs this negative humorchiefly, as though he had in memory La Bruyere's assertion that "he whomakes us laugh rarely is able to win esteem for himself." His positivehumor,--gay, exuberant, contagious,--finds its full field for displayin some of the short stories, and more especially in the Tartarinseries.
Has any book of our time caused more laughter than "Tartarin ofTarascon"--unless it be "Tartarin on the Alps"? I can think only of onerival pair, "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn,"--for Mark Twain andAlphonse Daudet both achieved the almost impossible feat of writing asuccessful sequel to a successful book, of forcing fortune to arepetition of a happy accident. The abundant laughter the Frenchhumorist excited is like that evoked by the American humorist,--clean,hearty, healthy, self-respecting; it is in both cases what George Eliotin one of her letters called "the exquisite laughter that comes from agratification of the reasoning faculty." Daudet and Mark Twain areimaginative realists; their most amusing extravagance is but anexaggeration of the real thing; and they never let factitious fantasysweep their feet off the ground. Tartarin is as typical of Provence asColonel Sellers--to take that figure of Mark Twain's which is mostlike--is typical of the Mississippi Valley.
Tartarin is as true as Numa Roumestan; in fact they may almost be saidto be sketched from the same model but in a very different temper. In"Numa Roumestan" we are shown the sober side of the Southerntemperament, the sorrow it brings in the house though it displays joyin the street; and in "Tartarin" we behold only the immense comicalityof the incessant incongruity between the word and the deed. Tartarin isSouthern, it is true, and French; but he is very human also. There is aboaster and a liar in most of us, lying in wait for a chance to rushout and put us to shame. It is this universality of Daudet's satirethat has given Tartarin its vogue on both sides of the Atlantic. Theingenuity of Tartarin's misadventures, the variety of them in Algiersand in Switzerland, the obvious reasonableness of them all, thedelightful probability of these impossibilities, the frank gaiety andthe unflagging high spirits,--these are precious qualities, all ofthem; but it is rather the essential humanness of Tartarin himself thathas given him a reputation throughout the world. Very rarely indeed nowor in the past has an author been lucky enough to add a single figureto the cosmopolitan gallery of fiction. Cervantes, De Foe, Swift, LeSage, Dumas, have done it; Fielding and Hawthorne and Turgenef havenot.
It is no wonder that Daudet takes pride in this. The real joy of thenovelist, he declares, is to create human beings, to put on their feettypes of humanity who thereafter circulate through the world with thename, the gesture, the grimace he has given them and who are cited andtalked about without reference to their creator and without even anymention of him. And whenever Daudet heard some puppet of politics orliterature called a Tartarin, a shiver ran through him--"the shiver ofpride of a father, hidden in the crowd that is applauding his son andwanting all the time to cry out 'That's my boy!'"
V.
The time has not yet come for a final estimate of Daudet'sposition,--if a time ever arrives when any estimate can be final. Butalready has a selection been made of the masterpieces which survive,and from which an author is judged by the next generation that willhave time to criticise only the most famous of the works thisgeneration leaves behind it. We can see also that much of Daudet'slater writing is slight and not up to his own high standard, althougheven his briefest trifle had always something of his charm, of hismagic, of his seductive grace. We can see how rare an endowment he haswhen we note that he is an acute observer of mankind, and yet withoutany taint of misanthropy, and that he combines fidelity of reproductionwith poetic elevation.
He is--to say once more what has already been said in these pages morethan once--he is a lover of romance with an unfaltering respect forreality. We all meet with strange experiences once in our lives, with"things you could put in a story," as the phrase is; but we none of ushave hairbreadth escapes every morning before breakfast. The romanticis as natural as anything else; it is the excess of the romantic whichis in bad taste. It is the piling up of the agony which is disgusting.It is the accumulation upon one impossible hero of many exceptionaladventures which is untrue and therefore immoral. Daudet's mostindividual peculiarity was his skill in seizing the romantic aspects ofthe commonplace. In one of his talks with his son he said that anovelist must beware of an excess of lyric enthusiasm; he himselfsought for emotion, and emotion escaped when human proportions wereexceeded. Balance, order, reserve, symmetry, sobriety,--these are thequalities he was ever praising. The real, the truthful, thesincere,--this is what he sought always to attain.
Daudet may lack the poignant intensity of Balzac, the lyric sweep ofHugo, the immense architectural strength of M. Zola, the implacabledisinterestedness of Flaubert, the marvellous concentration ofMaupassant, but he has more humor than any of them and morecharm,--more sympathy than any but Hugo, and more sincerity thanany but Flaubert. His is perhaps a rarer combination than any oftheirs,--the gift of story-telling, the power of character-drawing,the grasp of emotional situation, the faculty of analysis, the feelingfor form, the sense of style, an unfailing and humane interest in hisfellow-men, and an irresistible desire to tell the truth about life ashe saw it with his own eyes.
BRANDER MATTHEWS.
Columbia University,in the City of New York.